Delilah?
I just saw the photo. It’s not what it looks like.
She hugged me. I didn’t want it. I pushed her away right after.
Please let me explain.
All of them delivered. None of them read.
“Did she say anything?” I ask. “Before I left for LA, did she seem upset about something?”
Eleanor hesitates. “No. She seemed happy. That’s what I don’t understand. She was humming while she made coffee yesterday morning. She never hums.”
Happy. She was happy.
And then Penelope Waters walked into her flower shop with a photograph, and everything fell apart.
I know that’s what happened. I know it in my bones. Someone showed her that photo, the one of Mia hugging me outside the labelbuilding, and instead of asking me about it, Delilah decided she already knew the answer.
“I need to find her,” I say.
“Levi...”
“I can’t just sit here. I can’t...” My voice breaks. I hate that it breaks. I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m standing in a kitchen falling apart like I’m eight again, watching my mom’s taillights disappear down the driveway. “I have to find her.”
Eleanor studies me for a long moment. Something shifts in her expression, recognition maybe. Like she sees something in me she understands.
Then she pulls out her phone.
“We share our locations,” she says quietly. “In case of emergencies. I didn’t check until later because I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but she was at some motel until about an hour ago.”
She turns the screen toward me.
There’s a little dot with Delilah’s face on it. Oakwood Cemetery. Asheville, North Carolina.
“Her father,” Eleanor says. “He’s buried there. She always ran to him when things got hard.” A pause, and something painful crosses her face. “Even when he was alive, she ran to him instead of me. Robert never pushed her to deal with her feelings. He just let her be angry. Let her blame me for thedivorce, for staying in Twin Waves, for everything.” She sets the phone down. “I suppose some things don’t change.”
I stare at the screen. At the little dot that represents the woman I love, sitting alone in a cemetery at dawn, talking to a man who can’t answer her.
“She didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
“No.” Eleanor’s voice is gentle. “She didn’t.”
“I would have told her about the photo. I didn’t even know it was out there until after she hung up on me. Diane called me, and I googled myself, and there it was. And then I tried to call Delilah back, over and over, and she just...” I stop. Breathe. “She just left. Without talking to me. Without letting me explain anything.”
“That’s what she does.”
“I know that’s what she does. She did it twice before. But I thought...” I can’t finish the sentence. I thought this time was different, that she was done running. I thought I was enough to make her stay.
Apparently I was wrong.
“Come inside,” Eleanor says. “You look like you haven’t slept.”
“I slept on the plane.” A lie. I stared at the ceiling of that jet for five hours, replaying every conversation we’d had, trying to figure out what I missed. WhatI could have said differently. Whether any of it would have mattered.
“Come inside anyway. I’ll make coffee. You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
I don’t want coffee. I want to get in my truck and drive to Asheville and make Delilah look at me while I explain what really happened.
